Just Another Birthday
by NobleCaliber
Summary: The only reason she's ever owned a lighter was to burn his cards. It's painful, but it heals. Even after there's nothing left to heal and a man who's better than the angry ashes, she keeps burning because the only place left for him is behind that flame.


Loosely based off of Casting Crowns' _Just Another Birthday_ and inspired by the Juliet/Frank relationship demonstrated in _In For A Penny. _Definite Shules.

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Her eighth birthday finds her sitting alone in the kitchen while her friends are entertained by what is possibly the worst clown on the planet.

He _told_ her he'd be there. He _told_ her he'd come. But he's not there. She eats her mom's homemade cake without tasting it. She gets fantastic gifts, but smiles through clenched teeth and thanks people while blinking back tears.

He sent a card.

She'd trade every card he's sent for him to be there once, in that moment. Every Christmas card, ever birthday card, every little gift he's dropped on her bedside table she'd trade for one day with him.

_Another birthday, come and gone without him._

Tenth birthday, same thing happens. He promised, but all she gets is a piece of cardstock with an equally thin apology. She's almost come to expect this, but still had that slip of hope.

All his cards are pinned up on a corkboard in her bedroom. That night, she takes them down and puts them in the bottom drawer of her dresser, the junk drawer. She doesn't allow any more than one tear, because she can't.

_And another._

Her sweet sixteen. It's a happy occasion, yes. She's really was having fun, but her father has managed to weasel his card into the stack of gifts.

He came last year and talked on the phone the whole time. His gift was impersonal and distant, as he was, standing in the back of the room. How dare he come back once and give her false hope like that?

She's so tired of this man she doesn't even know anymore, if she ever really did, breaking her heart year after year and time after time. She smiles through the rest of the gifts.

Everyone returns to her party, which her mother had planned meticulously. Hiding the card under a fold in her dress, she rushes to the bathroom, where Taylor, her closest friend, follows her and refuses to leave.

Angry now, more angry at him than she's ever even considered being, she rips the card to pieces, not even getting the satisfaction of watching it give under her hands because her vision in so blurred by tears she wishes she wouldn't shed.

As she finishes tearing the card to pieces too small to rip again with her hands, Taylor slides under the bottom of the stall door, dirtying her sky blue dress. She opens her palm once she's sitting beside Juliet, revealing a lighter.

"I stole it from Paul just in case," Paul is Taylor's delinquent uncle, who smokes cigarettes like it's his job.

Juliet takes the lighter and Taylor piles the shreddings of the card. For a moment, they just watch the tiny flame dance in the still of the room, before she dips the fire to the small mountain of paper.

Taylor opens a vent in the ceiling and holds Juliet's hand as they watch the paper bend and burn. It hurts badly, to sever her connection to her father like that, but in ripping open old wounds, they can heal properly.

The next day, Taylor shows up outside her window with the lighter and stays by her as she burns ever card and destroys every little gift. It feels like hydrogen peroxide to a cut, but the sting is always worth it in the end. It's therapy.

_And another._

Eighteen finds her at college, and the girls in the dorms sure do know how to throw a party. But in the end, she sits in the dirt outside and sends her birthday card up in flames with Taylor on the phone.

She says she's okay and if it were just a little more true, it wouldn't hold even a sliver of falsity. She tells herself that this year, he wouldn't be there anyway. It's just that those old cuts that they reopened on the bathroom floor just two short years ago healed right, they just healed so thin.

_And another._

Twenty-one and she makes sure not to get drunk enough to remember to borrow a lighter and feel some twisted satisfaction and strangled pain as she watches the smoky wisps curl into the night and the cardstock give under the weight of the customary flame.

She cries this year, but her official story is that every tear was by fault of the alcohol.

_And another._

At twenty-five, she's left the east coast for the west coast. She'll never admit that part of her took the job hoping that he and his stupid cards couldn't follow her. She has to go to the drugstore to buy a lighter, because she did escape him for at least a year.

It occurs to her, as the ashes cool that night, that she hasn't seen her father in ten years. She wants to take pride in that, but a girl should never grow up without her father. Lloyd was a wonderful father figure, loved her as his own. He showed up to every birthday and was there the other three hundred sixty-four days every year, but he wasn't her father. As much as she sometimes wished he was, as much as she wished she could allow him to be her Daddy, he wasn't.

_And another_.

Thirty and Shawn brings him back into her life. She's shell shocked and she's damn angry. He's working on a score and she knows it, so when he disappears without a trace a few months later, she doesn't care. She's spent that last fifteen years conditioning herself so that she doesn't care.

It's nothing special, because she spent all those years telling herself that when, not if, he finally showed up, it would be spectacular and he'd do something to make it all up to her. So when he's there, it's even more of a disappointment than last year when he wasn't because it hits her hard that her father, the man who helped create her, means nothing to her.

She almost wishes she could feel any emotion but anger for the majority of his visit, but when she does it only serves to remind her how much it hurts

She burns the card and cries over him again for the first time in nine years with Shawn's arm wrapped around her shoulders.

_And another._

Thirty-five finds her with one child and another on the way. She wakes up to breakfast in bed, a homemade card in illegible handwriting (or maybe it's just scribbles), a small stack of gifts she adores from the family she loves, and a lifeless card in a boring white envelope.

She burns it with Shawn and doesn't even think about shedding a tear. She can honestly say, with upmost conviction, that nothing is missing on her birthday without her father.

_It's not just another birthday._ It's hugs and kisses from her beautiful child, an adoring smile that's barely acceptable with minors in the room from her husband, and without the pain her father never cared enough to even know he was causing.

Her family is whole. And she knows, despite Shawn's reputation, that her children will never go without their father on their birthday by any fault of Shawn's. And neither will she.

_It's not just another birthday; it never will be again._

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Review? Pretty please with pineapples on top?


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